Experiment 1. In 1612, the streets of Paris were alive with a tantalising rumour that a man had achieved immortality. In some ways that's not as big a jump as it sounds, he says. Gas, says Karen. But NIRS is not perfect, in part because it cannot measure what is happening in important inner brain regions such as the hippocampus or the amygdala. Their apparatus consisted of a bridge either side of which was a sturdy glass platform. Then, President Clinton had just ordered thousands of secret documents on government-sponsored human radiation experiments declassified and made available on the Internet. Ironically, their efforts to overcome it in cells have arguably helped to keep more of us alive than research into immortality ever has. Four centuries on from the publication of Flamels book, and his fans might be disappointed to hear that no one has made it to 300, let alone discovered the secret to living forever. Thanks for reading Scientific American. There is a well-worn adage in show business that you should never work with children or animals. He concluded that babies cannot grasp the concept that an object still exists when it is out of sight until they are around eight months old. Another reason WI-38 has become so ubiquitous is that a quirk of the American legal system at the time of its discovery: it wasnt possible to patent living things. She acknowledges that the experiments were not intended, nor were they, of any benefit to the children who served as mere guinea pigs. He lets out a gurgle, and moments later, a short cry. Scientists there have pioneered techniques such as infant near-infrared spectrometry (NIRS), which measures brain activity by recording the colour, and therefore the oxygenation, of blood. In the 50s, cerebral palsied children were considered to be developmentally disabled, mentally retarded, says Alves to correspondent Vicki Mabrey. After a few days, he wasleft with a continuous sheet of cells. For the HeLa cell line, there have been some efforts to achieve this. Why are the cells so special? But life would be a struggle for the Dal Molins because Mark was born with cerebral palsy, a condition that cripples the body, but not necessarily the mind. It was originally adopted by medical physicists at UCL as a technique to help predict the risk of stroke in premature babies. I just needed to know and, no matter what it was, I needed to know. In total, the cells are likely to have saved 10.3 million lives from deadly diseases (Credit: Andrew Brookes/Getty Images). Susan Lederer, who teaches medical history at Yale University, and was a member of President Clintons Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments, told 60 Minutes that the researchers and staff regarded the children as the raw material of medical research. When they died researchers acquired their brains, also without consent. It works: Caitlin is now cooing and smiling. The researchers used 113 newborns ranging in age from one hour to three days old as test subjects. In the 1960s, researchers at the University of California began an experiment to study changes in blood pressure and blood flow. Scientific American, 206 (5), 62-73. These inactivated particles become the active ingredient the part that teaches the immune system what to look out for. In it, he claimed to have successfully made the philosopher's stone, a mythical object which allows its owner to turn base metals to gold and produce the elixir of life. This article has been amended to clarify that WI-38 is one of the oldest cell lines in use, rather than the oldest, and which vaccines it is used to produce today. But though the Hayflick limit currently seems like a formidable barrier for people, its no longer such a problem for scientists. Animals are able to judge depth as soon as they are mobile, whether that is immediately after birth/hatching or somewhat later. An infant may look longer in order to relate the event to what it already knows, says Kagan. This was a repeated measures design because the infant was called from both the cliff side and the shallow side of the apparatus. Back in 2017, Hayflick asked Olshansky to quantify exactly how many lives the cells had spared until that point. The field is now becoming more sophisticated, thanks in part to the Birkbeck lab. By the time the answer is in, it may be too late for treatment to do much good. He ran extremely high fevers that none of us here right now would live through, says Karen. The consistency of the results over a range of species including humans adds credibility to the findings. As it was possible to eliminate or control the influences of other senses (such as touch from the rats whiskers) they ensured it was a valid test of visual perception. Simply looking at the drop, or being encouraged to cross it by their mothers, may have distressed the babies they didnt know the glass was there to save them. Though there hasnt been a single case of polio in the United States since 1979, a significant number of people are still thought to be living with the after-effects. Today the cells are routinely used to make vaccines against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella zoster (chicken pox), herpes zoster, adenovirus, rabies and Hepatitis A. A recently released book details the experiments the US government undertook, over decades, on their own unknowing citizens to test the effects of radiation. Mark was one of 1,100 Sonoma State cerebral palsy patients who were experimented on from 1955-1960. Alas, it wasnt true. If you liked this story,sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. The second experiment aimed to explore this possibility using animals. Children have historically been the voiceless victims of medical research abuse and the doctors and staff who abused them have almost never been held accountable they are shielded by a whitewashed wall of silence. This is the story of the cells that helped to overcome this obstacle, and their controversial origins at a clinic in Sweden. Piaget went on to develop the theory that babies are essentially born as blank slates, but possess the machinery that motivates them to explore the world and allows them to assimilate knowledge. (Learn more about the immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks.). Scientific American, 202 (4), 64-71. and my mom was told I was too big and had an enlarged thymus and radiation was necessary to prevent me from growing to gigantic proportions. Some of the conditions are well known, like sickle cell anemia, some obscure, affecting less than 100 infants a year. The independent variable (IV) was whether the infant was called by its mother from the cliff side or the shallow side (of the visual cliff apparatus). . Gas, says Karen. Participants who are pushed around in wheelchairs failed to learn to cope with the visual distortion (held 7 Bossom, 1961). The visual cliff. Experiments on Newborns. However, the sample of human infants was quite small and the age range rather large some were likely to have been crawling for sometime before they were tested. I was interested in how Ezra would respond, but also in why those tasks were being done, she says. Children were the raw material of medical research - CBS 60 Minutes /Newborn Screening for 29 conditions - NYT . Using the same apparatus, Gibson and Walk tested chicks, lambs and kids (young goats) all less than 24 hours old. Years later it came out that many babies were treated with radiation. I never dreamed that in this country, they would do experimenting children. The researchers used 113 newborns ranging in age from one hour to three days old as test subjects. In 2005, Johnson and his colleagues combined observations of looking time with electrical measurements of brain activity to investigate Piaget's claim that infants younger than nine months do not understand the permanence of an object that has vanished. The dependent variable (DV) was whether or not the child would crawl to its mother. He would laugh or he would cry if he was unhappy., The childrens father, Bill Dal Molin, felt that Rosemarie was neglecting their three daughters, because of Mark. Lederer told 60 Minutes that she wasnt shocked by the findings because "researchers have been using disabled children in experiments for over a century." But while no one argues with the idea of saving babies, the proposed screening is generating fierce debate. One clinical trial at the Babylab already suggests that early intervention can have an effect. Nobody told me. What are the physical features of the stimulus? Johnson built his career doing both. In the 1960s, the polio vaccine used in the United States had been hit by calamity. Julia Russell has over 25 years of experience as a Psychology teacher. But Johnson was more interested in human development, so after his PhD he took a research-scientist position in London to begin studying infants. Deny it. In the 1960s, Harry Harlow developed an experimental model that took Spitz's studies even further. In total, the cells are likely to have saved 10.3 million lives from deadly diseases (Credit: Andrew Brookes . The visual cliff. On the other side of the bridge was a cliff the chequered pattern was beneath a vertical drop. He established a baby lab at University College London (UCL) in 1993, and it moved to more spacious premises at Birkbeck in 1998. But after the end of World War II, doctors began to push back. In one experiment, a catheter was inserted through the umbilical arteries . The waiting room is brightly decorated and scattered with easy-to-clean toys. Some vaccines are made by growing viral particles in cells, and then killing or weakening them so that they cant cause disease. Baby Caitlin stares intently at the screen; she does not seem to be copying the woman's actions. I just remember one day coming home from school and the house was very quiet, says Karen, who never got to say goodbye to her brother. However, while Lacks' descendents are generally proud of what her cells have achieved, some have been critical that others have profited from them, when her own family has not. I mean, we can provide this many guinea pigs for you., Sonoma State is now known as Sonoma Developmental Center. Despite the institutions continued denial that such experiments took place, the facts were uncovered by Karen Alves who spent 12 years on a hunt to find out what happened to her little brother, Mark, who had cerebral palsy and was sent to Sonoma in 1958, at age 3. On Feb. 9, CBS 60 Minutes reported about the buried secrets at Sonoma State Hospital (now Sonoma Developmental Center), where 3,500 children with disabilities lived in the 1950s and 1960s. But it's not clear if the baby is actually copying, or perhaps they just stick out their tongue whenever something exciting happens, de Klerk says. These additional conditions show up as abnormalities, but no one knows what they mean. Numerous experiments which are performed on human test subjects in the United States are considered unethical, because they are performed without the knowledge or informed consent of the test subjects.Such tests have been performed throughout American history, but some of them are ongoing.The experiments include the exposure of humans to many chemical and biological weapons (including . Behind a curtain, postdoc Jannath Begum Ali checks the data streaming in on her monitor. The procedure was a rigorously controlled laboratory test so offered a reliable but also safe measure of depth perception. One of these cells eventually turned into the cell line WI-38, which stands for Wistar Institute foetus 38. That is the challenge embraced by scientists at the Babylab. This time the abortion happened in England in 1966 for psychiatric reasons. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the American Pediatric Society-Society for Pediatric Research meeting was a very exciting place to be, with many new discoveries presented. Then a young American scientist, Leonard Hayflick, made a discovery which shocked the world. The five-month-old's eyes rest on a series of pictures: three dancing women, four black circles, then a face among random objects. There has been some controversy over the use of cells produced in this manner (Credit: Claudio Divizia /EyeEm/Getty Images). Any material collected is subject to the Common Rule a set of ethical standards introduced in 1981, which researchers must comply with in order to receive federal funding. Achieving a proper balance between this social good and the obligation to protect infants who participate in research is a significant challenge. He argues that the newborn has basic attention preferences for things such as faces and speech, and that these preferences shape the brain as it develops. 60 Minutes Wednesday learned that between 1955 and 1960, the brain of every cerebral palsy child who died at Sonoma State was removed and studied. Findings such as these tell us that, at least in some respects, depth perception is learned. The history of newborn screening, they say, is filled with cautionary tales.The majority of newborn screening tests have failed, said Dr. Norman Fost, a professor of pediatrics and director of the program in medical ethics at the University of Wisconsin. In the waiting room, Caitlina four-month-old in stripy blue dungareesis receiving a last-minute breastfeed before being ushered into a lab. Their mother also participated in the experiment. In such situations people adapt readily within about an hour but only if they are able to actively interact with their environment. Dr. Lainie Friedman Ross, a pediatrician and medical ethicist at the University of Chicago, said: We dont know if they are medical conditions. In one experiment, a catheter was inserted through the umbilical arteries and . They took my brothers brain without consent, and the doctor, in his obituary it said that he had one of the largest brain collections, says Karen. The mimicry experiment is a prime example of the Babylab's mixed-methods approach. Johnson's observation that young babies prefer direct eye contact is one such example; this sets them up to focus on socially relevant parts of their surroundings, which in turn enables them to learn about language and other social cues such as facial expressions. Together, the findings suggest that depth perception is an innate process. In a series of controversial experiments conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s, psychologist Harry Harlow demonstrated the powerful effects of love on normal development. MMV, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. Jones is currently piloting 'gaze-contingent' tasks, which enable babies to become active participants in experiments. I'm an infant scientist, it reads. Depth cues allow people to detect depth in a visual scene. By then, a German team had already published the full sequence on the internet. By tracking the flow of oxygenated blood, NIRS allows scientists to see which brain areas become more active in response to external events. It is not known whether they are associated with a disease or, if so, what the effects will be. Theresa Murphy showed 60 Minutes Wednesday the final resting place of 1,400 Sonoma State patients. Lederer said that using captive populations meant big money for medical researchers: It would even be an advantage in applying for grant money, because you dont have to go to the problem of recruiting subjects. In the case of Sonoma State, records show that when the study began, cerebral palsy admissions there jumped by 300 percent. Lederer read the study that was conducted at Sonoma State Hospital, and says the children underwent painful experimentation for which they received no direct benefit. It seems clear that these were intended to enlarge knowledge about cerebral palsy, adds Lederer. See also: Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents https://amzn.to/3jyHHAV #adThe narrat. since David's real mother had given consent, and programs like this continued on up until the 1960s, when people finally realized that the only practice baby you should really get is your . Sample: 36 infants ranging in age from six months to 14 months. Karen Alves wasnt able to find out what tests Mark was subjected to. The mean systolic blood pressure was 7.1 cm Hg (range 5.8 to 9.5). If a woman is infected early on, she has a 90% chance of passing the virus to her unborn child, where it can lead to congenital rubella syndrome and a constellation of health problems, from brain damage to hearing loss. The connection between the chilling origins of many cell lines and the benefits they provide is perhaps most striking in the development of the rubella vaccine. They didnt even say where they were calling from. But you know, theres just nothing in our archives about the research you are talking about. If these studies were being done, if there are patients from here being sent for radiation studies, is that a stain on the hospital record, asks Mabrey. And, like its subjects, the London lab is growing up. (The chicks were particularly drawn to objects with hen-like necks and faces, but weren't too fussy about the rest of their looks.) It is not completely clear why this is, but the working hypothesis is that these infants are more attentive to the details of what they see, says Teodora Gliga, who led the odd-one-out study. And there are still so many questions that demand answers. Apart from the fact that some people feel uncomfortable about its links to abortion, the woman whose foetus the cells came from, who Wadman has named Mrs X, did not consent to its use. And both sides agree that the tests unintentionally pick up about 25 other conditions, in addition to the 29 that the screening is intended to find. Or would it be better to forgo most of them? Today it's still used to make the rubella vaccine part of Merck's measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) jab and Teva's adenovirus vaccine for the US military. The cells from WI-38 were never restricted, which means they could be shared freely with scientists around the world (Credit: Andrew Brookes/Getty Images). . How do differences in the temperaments of babies develop into more complex personality traits as children age? The naturally occurring independent variable (IV) was the animal species e.g. Then Caitlin is shown a series of video sequences of a woman raising her eyebrows or opening and closing her mouth, interspersed with static pictures of farm animals. Without it, you and I might not even be alive, says Stuart Jay Olshansky, an expert in biodemography and gerontology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. The issue was first brought to the public attention by the 2010 book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about an African-American woman of the same name who unknowingly had cells taken from a cervical tumour and turned into the popular cell line HeLa in 1951. That was the opinion that Johnson quickly reached when he began infant research: the reliance on looking time and observations alone were unsatisfying. Experiments on Newborns. But I just dont think it is proper for us to have information about an abnormality without conveying it. But Dr. Lainie Friedman Ross, a pediatrician and medical ethicist at the University of Chicago, said: We dont know if they are medical conditions. Stratton (1897) and Kohler (1962) used complex optical apparatus to change their view of the world, e.g. Kohler, I. Other, less dramatic, changes to perception can be induced by shifting the field of view slightly to one side then testing depth perception, eg by the ability to point accurately to a target. It profoundly affected me., Rosemarie had committed 3-year-old Mark to Sonoma State Hospital, the largest institution for children in California. Stratton, G. M. (1897). Looking time is under the control of so many conditions, Kagan says. At that point, everyone takes a break. Walk developed the visual cliff test to use with human infants and animals. So I went to the recorders office, says Karen. In his laboratory at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, he managed to incubate some of the tissue in several glass bottles at 37C (98F). The tests conducted included: inserting a catheter through the umbilical cord and into the newborn . In 2013, the Babylab started the flagship project of which Ezra is part: an effort to study infants from 12 weeks old who are at high risk of autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), alongside a control group, in order to detect more early signs of these conditions and find behavioural therapies that might help. This includes potentially hundreds of thousands with post-polio syndrome, in which muscles slowly weaken and shrink. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. What I learned from this experience is the value of facts and verified statements about animal behavior. Both sides agree that the tests "unintentionally pick up about 25 other conditions, in addition to the 29 that the screening is intended to find. And why can't people remember their earliest months and years? One of the clerks came over to the front desk, leaned over and said When did he die? And I said, 1961. Well, when did he go into Sonoma State? And I said, 1958, and she said, You better look into it, because strange things happened there. Psychological Review, 4 (4), 341. He is chewing a sock. The study of which Ezra is part aims to extend this work by collecting more-detailed measures from over 400 familiesand to identify those features that are strongly associated with the later onset of a developmental disorder. Ezra studies the screen with fascinationalthough now and then, his attention wanders. Giving parents the result, saying, Heres the mutation; we are not sure what the outcome will be, is better than not telling, said Sharon Terry, president and chief executive of the Genetic Alliance, an advocacy group for people with genetic disorders. NIRS is transforming the ability of researchers to peer into the minds of babies. After five months, the team saw hints of improvements in the babies' engagement, attention and social behaviour, compared with controls. Infant neuroscience leapt forward in the early 1960s, when the US developmental psychologist Robert Fantz started measuring the amount of time babies spent looking at something as a way to gauge how interested in it they were. There have been literally thousands of experiments done with these looking-time methods, Aslin says, and by and large it is a pretty reliable technique; you can have two labs running the same experiment and you get the same results. But Aslin and Kagan are two of a growing number of researchers who think that such infant studies should be viewed with caution: it can be dangerous to infer too much about the workings of a baby's mind from just their fleeting glanceand they worry that some labs do not control for confounding factors as well as they should. However, as human infants take several months to crawl it is possible that they had learned their ability to perceive depth during this time. I never believed he was mentally retarded. Whether the introduction of the virus had any medical consequences is still under question as is the possibility that it is now spreading to people who were never vaccinated. Numerous vaccines are made using the cells, which were taken from a foetus in the 1960s. rat / chick / lamb / kitten. Out of curiosity, I started to read it, and they mentioned patients that were in state-run hospitals being used, says Karen. Gibson and R.D. ', Things got stranger still when Karen noticed an article in the local paper saying 16,000 people, including children, had been used in radiation experiments. Over the years, Dr. Fost said, thousands of normal kids have been killed or gotten brain damage by screening tests and treatments that turned out to be ineffective and very dangerous. To those who ask what is wrong with simply doing every available screening test, Dr. Fost tells what happened with PKU, the first genetic screening test for newborns. I believe that Dad did what he felt was best for the family. Reporting test data for which there are no systems in place for follow-up testing and treatment is not rejecting paternalism, but it is patient abandonment. In any event, Dr. Howell said, noting that states were plunging into testing programs: Its not really a question of, Should we expand newborn screening? Its happening.